Battle of the Bastards: an extension of the strategy perspective
Spoiler alert: references to Game of Thrones through Season 6 Episode 9.
My friend makes an excellent case here for why Ramsay Bolton was a better strategist than Jon Snow in the Battle of the Bastards. I agree with him. In Aristotelian analysis, virtue tends to lie somewhere in-between two extremes — one of deficit, the other of excess. From this perspective, courage is the “golden mean” between the extremes of two vices: cowardice and foolhardiness. In the Battle of the Bastards, Jon Snow displayed an excess of courage, a foolhardiness that bordered on recklessness, mitigated only by luck and the machinations of his sister, Lady Sansa Stark.
Where Jon was reckless, his adversary Ramsay was calculating. Where Ramsay flawlessly executed his plan, Jon discarded his once he began to react to Ramsay’s. Where Ramsay had a line of sight to Jon’s interests and motivations, Jon appeared incapable of reining-in his own impulses — even though his sister had forewarned him of Ramsay’s penchant for mind games. So, yes, when it comes to the Battle of the Bastards, Ramsay Bolton trumped Jon Snow, both in the substantive strategy and in the execution thereof.
In this article, I argue that though Ramsay Bolton demonstrated a flair for strategy in the Battle of the Bastards, his strategy is the sort I shall call petit strategy — strategy with a small ‘s’, or strategy-in-the-small. Ramsay Bolton has no overarching, long-term strategy. His ambitions are limited: he wants to be Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North. And his approach to laying claim to, and sustaining, these titles is to take things one-day-at-a-time, as they come. His capture and torture of Theon Greyjoy was opportunistic; so were his murders of his father, step-mother, and baby half-brother. While Ramsay Bolton has no long-term strategy, he excels at incremental strategy: planning and execution to quickly take advantage of emergent opportunity.
Contrast this with that I shall call grand strategy — strategy with a big ‘S’, or strategy-in-the-large. Consider Petyr Baelish (Littlefinger), a man who arguably kicked-off the momentous events of the series by having Lysa Tully poison her husband, Jon Arryn, Hand to King Robert Baratheon (and then having Lysa write her sister, Catherine, implicating the Lannisters in Arryn’s death). Littlefinger also committed numerous other atrocities, smug, self-satisfied smirk and all: betraying Ned Stark, complicity in the murder of King Joffery Baratheon, pushing Lysa out of the Moon Door at The Eyrie, giving Sansa Stark to the Boltons, manipulating the young Lord Robin Arryn, et cetera. Why does Littlefinger do all he does? Well, he’s already told us: he wants “Everything… Everything there is.” A limitless ambition, to be sure.
As such, all that Littlefinger does fits into the context of the long arc that gets him from here to “everything there is”. And many players in the game of thrones do not realize they are dispensable pawns in Littlefinger’s game. Ramsay Bolton had a strategy (a petit one, understand), but it will turn out his exploits were merely an aspect of a grander strategy — Littlefinger’s.
The applicability of this analysis extends to real life. A plan is better than no plan. A plan or strategy that takes into account the adversary’s or competitor’s motivations and interests is better than one that doesn’t. The point I hope comes through though relates to the temporal dimension of strategy: that petit strategy, short-term focused and adaptive to exigency, is liable to fold in the face of grand strategy.